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Federated Semantic Services Platform for Open Materials Science and Engineering

The White House’s Materials Genome Initiate (MGI) seeks to substantially improve the process of new material discovery and development, and shorten the time to deployment. Two of the core components of this initiative - new and sophisticated computer modeling technologies and next-generation experimental tools - received initial federal research support through 2012. The third major component is that of developing solutions for broader access to scientific data about materials to aid in achieving the goal of faster development of new materials at lower costs.

Our approach recognizes the need for providing easy access to large amounts of highly distributed and heterogeneous data – including unstructured (scientific literature or publications), semi-structured and structured data. We recognize the need to support a variety of data as well as resources that provide data using APIs and Web services. We recognize the need for tools to be able to easily exchange data. We also recognize the need for integrated provenance (i.e., data lineage) to support data quality and relevance, and access control for organizations to share information when desired and yet keep valuable intellectual property confidential. To address these requirements, we will use recent advances in semantic web (standards, search and query processing techniques and tools, Web of Data or Linked Open Data) and semantic services computing, along with integral support for provenance and access control. In a complementary effort during the first year, the development of domain models and knowledge bases (ontologies, taxonomies, and vocabularies), will be carried out with support from ARFL’s Materials and Manufacturing
Directorate.

This three-year project will undertake three broad classes of tasks. The first related to creating semantic infrastructure including ability to create semantic metadata for a variety of data types utilizing domain models and knowledge bases. The second relates to semantic search for all varieties of data, including resources with services based access. The third relates to development of a novel semantic data exchange scheme for materials science (termed Linked Open Materials Data) by developing an open data based
approach.

MatVocabconsists of a vocabulary for the materials manufacturing and design domain that is intended to be curated by domain experts with a platform for domain experts to curate vocabulary. MatVocab can bring the materials and manufacturing and design community together to develop of a common
vocabulary.